Freiburg City Forest - Germany

Steigerwald - Germany

Staufen Municipality Forest - Germany

Bohemian Forest - Czech Republic

Loch Vaa Forest - Scotland

Bavarian Forest - Germany

The History of Pro Silva Europe Since 1989

Pro Silva was founded at Robanov Kot, Savinja valley, Slovenia, September 22th 1989.

From the 1960s to the 1980s there was regular meetings, more or less informal, of the perialpine Chairs of Silviculture from Universities advocating Close-to-Nature ideas (Ljubljana, Munich, Zürich and sometimes Nancy) discussing ways of implementing this form of forest management inspired from virgin forest dynamics.

Also during this time a group of forest practitioners ANW, in the wake of Alfred Möllers’s movement, supported the implementation of Continuous Close-to-Nature Forest management.

The idea of Prof Dušan Mlinšek, recent past president of the IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organizations) was to merge both groups and expand it to welcome all Europeans foresters convinced of these ideas. So in 1989 Prof Mlinšekinvited, conjointly with Hilmar Schoepffer and Brice de Turckheim, leaders in this field at the time (see list of the founding members below) to Slovenia, to constitute a corresponding European movement.